Our situation: a long-term substitute teacher needed access to a particular platform we use for managing textbook resources on-line. But we contract out our subs so they're technically not district employees.

Which means they don't exist in our SIS.

Access to the platform is granted via automated sync with an export from our SIS.

There's no other way to manually enter accounts into the platform.

I contacted the platform's support line. The support person had to escalate my question to the design engineers (wut?). What they came back with was priceless and just a classic engineer-grade solution.

"You can enter the teacher manually in the CSV, but yes, she'll get overwritten each time the export runs. So you can either disable the automated export and sync, or you can manually add her as a district administrator."

Those were the two options.

Disable automation, or grant her the powers that I have.

I say "classic engineer-grade solution" because it addresses the problem without thinking outside of the problem. We're not even talking about "outside the box" thinking; this is just another part of the same box that they're not looking at!

12 Replies

FWIW, we had the same situation when a teacher went on maternity leave. Even though our sub was contracted out, we just stuck her in our SIS (Infinite Campus) as a temp employee with very limited rights, basically just enough for the sync to pick her up as teacher. Our saving grace was that we don't run financials through IC, so the sub didn't get paid twice...

Our subs are directly employed so we don't have the same issues, but I could piggyback on this rant just to gripe about SIS issues and limitations lol. We switched this summer to a new SIS, and I never thought I'd miss the old one as much as I have.

When are you up for renewal on the textbook management system and is there an alternative product? If there is an alternative, give them a call and get a quote, ask about how they handle your specific issue. If that works out, you could try forwarding the support dialog to the sales rep for your current product, tell them it's unacceptable and you'll be looking for a product that better meets your needs if they can't escalate/resolve it.

Either that our partner them up with a colleague who is authorized to use the system and can provide the necessary information. Or could you make a generic account in the SIS, First name: Longterm Lastname: Sub?

It sounds like that company that starts with P. (I try not to mention their name.)

We had this year a teacher that went with an online text and the import is so bad. There are 4 different files to set them up; Teachers, Sections, Students, Enrollments

You load the teachers, then load the sections and tie the teachers to the sections. Students are then loaded and then students are placed in an enrollment file that ties them to the sections and then ultimately to the teacher.

Here's the kicker, if you have a student that you need to add, you have to add them to the original file and then upload the student and enrollment file. It's the same process to remove a student.

We don't add subs into our SIS package. We just have a building administrator work with that long term sub to put grades into the SIS. The long term subs though get access to a computer account and e-mail.

It sounds like that company that starts with P. (I try not to mention their name.)

We had this year a teacher that went with an online text and the import is so bad. There are 4 different files to set them up; Teachers, Sections, Students, Enrollments

You load the teachers, then load the sections and tie the teachers to the sections. Students are then loaded and then students are placed in an enrollment file that ties them to the sections and then ultimately to the teacher.

Here's the kicker, if you have a student that you need to add, you have to add them to the original file and then upload the student and enrollment file. It's the same process to remove a student.

We don't add subs into our SIS package. We just have a building administrator work with that long term sub to put grades into the SIS. The long term subs though get access to a computer account and e-mail.

I think our process is similar in that subs aren't given access to the SIS gradebook, but long-term subs are.

My complaint with our current SIS is mostly due to what it takes to export data from it. There isn't any way to scheduled exports from the interface, it's being hosted by our regional service center so they have to apply SQL scripts to export data. Problem is that the guy whose job is managing the SIS doesn't know SQL, so unless the vendor or another region has an existing script written specifically for that SIS and vendor and shares it with him, we can't schedule the export and I just have to run it manually periodically.

It sounds like that company that starts with P. (I try not to mention their name.)

We had this year a teacher that went with an online text and the import is so bad. There are 4 different files to set them up; Teachers, Sections, Students, Enrollments

You load the teachers, then load the sections and tie the teachers to the sections. Students are then loaded and then students are placed in an enrollment file that ties them to the sections and then ultimately to the teacher.

Here's the kicker, if you have a student that you need to add, you have to add them to the original file and then upload the student and enrollment file. It's the same process to remove a student.

We don't add subs into our SIS package. We just have a building administrator work with that long term sub to put grades into the SIS. The long term subs though get access to a computer account and e-mail.

Close. Starts with a "C" but you have 50% chance of nailing the correct one (because we use two companies that start with "C"). ;)

But I know which "P" you're talking about. Actually, I think everyone would know who you're talking about because they are so universally hated. :)

But to Mr.Reagan's point, I don't have a say in which platform to go to, because that's driven by curriculum. Not all platforms make all materials available, and the teachers and instructional leaders choose the materials for their curriculum. Then determine who provides it in their catalog of products. This is why we have accounts with Pearson, Houghton Mifflin, McGraw Hill, National Geographic, and I don't even know how many others.

And all of them handle their imports differently.

It's starting to feel like these companies primarily target small districts of maybe 1000-4000 kids for the whole district, because the navigation and administration tools they provide are beyond rudimentary. Then you have bigger districts like mine, who have more kids, more teachers, more sections, more courses....but the same deadlines and not always a proportionately larger support staff.

And of course, we're changing SISes this year, so we'll have to review all of our scripts over the summer.....and then since Flash is being killed in 2020, we'll need to start reviewing which companies still deliver content via Flash and what their plans are for migration.....

And of course, we're changing SISes this year, so we'll have to review all of our scripts over the summer.....and then since Flash is being killed in 2020, we'll need to start reviewing which companies still deliver content via Flash and what their plans are for migration.....

We did that this summer and it suuuuuucked. Curriculum made the decision in like April so we didn't have enough time to evaluate with vendors if they would be compatible with the new system and come up with a migration plan. And by we, I mean technology; curriculum talked to vendor sales people/customer reps (for their programs, not any of the numerous other programs that were tied to SIS) who of course just said "yeah we can support any SIS", not knowing anything about it. One of the biggest blows was finding out the company whose platform we use for provisioning AD accounts wasn't compatible after we'd already paid to renew. I ended up spending a month of the summer writing my own powershell script to do it (which is probably good anyway, save $$$ next year) but since we can't schedule exports from the new SIS I have to manually run this every day.

We are so fed up with our SIS package we would love to switch, but I keep saying that we need to start evaluating new packages in August with and adoption time of January or February to give us enough time to trial extracting data out of the old one and into the new one and then training our office staff ahead of or during summer and then pulling our teachers in sometime late summer to get them up to speed on the new system.

I say if nothing has been done to move towards a new SIS package for a new school year by February, forget it, we'll all be ticked at each other trying to learn a new SIS package and tie it into current software packages the we feed with our current SIS package.

I feel that some vendors are not very friendly with what we have to deal with in the K-12 space. While they say it is admin friendly, some aren't. And while we are a small school district, around 1100 students K-12, Our staff is small too. The IT department consists of myself. I do have a part time person a few times a year, but it isn't enough to keep afloat. A lot of these textbook imports fall on myself and the Director of Instruction and I usually end up doing them because I am the one that can get into the SIS and run the exports needed to load them into these systems.

Oh I feel your pain when curriculum makes a decision and IT has to implement it. Our curriculum deportment bought a math curriculum from the evil P and I found out after the fact. I thought I had it made because the evil P said it was OneRoster compliant. I gave myself a high five because our SIS is also OneRoster compliant. But when I started digging into it, evil P only takes OneRoster csv files and our SIS only supports the OneRoster API. So I had to create 7 different ad-hocs, zip them together and send them to evil P via FTP. I have it automated now, but it look a long time to work out all the bugs.

The alternative is to have every teacher create their own student accounts and rosters. Ugh!!

BTW; the evil P requires that every student username is unique, not just unique to my tenant, but unique to the entire evil P operation. In order for my 1st graders to take an online assessment in said math curriculum they have to log in with their ENTIRE email address.